Not sure what we’ll be using in the space, exactly, but I have sourced some interesting pieces I’d like to incorporate if I can. The primary requirement: casters! This wheeled cart thing appealed to me with its industrial finish and convenient handle. The center stacking/filing area has some potential as well.   I like this rolling bookcase/magazine rack because I’d like to work some sort of easy reading / relaxing space into the classroom. The colored rectangles on the bottom shelf are paper and can be removed.   This is our laptop cart, it needs to be in the room to house our 24 laptops. Note the stylish "aftermarket" locking mechanism.   We will NOT be using these tables or workstations but I wanted to get this photo for reference. The current tables used in Computer Lab are 23.5″ high and they have worked well for our K-4 students. Chair height is 16″.That’s all for now!

Casey Cohen has been teaching secondary English for eight years and high school English at String Theory - Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School (a 1:1 Apple Distinguished school) for the past two years. Follow Casey Cohen   This episode of House of #EdTech is sponsored by:   TodaysMeet.com   HelpHub.me   Audible.com   House of #EdTech VIP: Natalie Krayenvenger   Complete shownotes: http://www.chrisnesi.com/2015/07/app-smashing-with-casey-cohen-and-my-iste2015-review-hoet039.html   FEEDBACK Call: (732) 903-4869 Voxer: mrnesi Email: feedback@chrisnesi.com Twitter: @mrnesi   Send a voice message from http://www.chrisnesi.com

Giggle a minute.. . Check out @jesslahey’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/jesslahey/status/422042729179144192

Here is an interesting factoid from Peter Pinch, Director of WGBH (Boston public television) regarding the breakdown of mobile traffic on their national interactive sites during the past month (which I presume is for the month of April 2010): mSafari...

Click image to see more FutureLearn photos on flickr Well, it’s over.  After a 2 week break for Christmas and New Year, the final two weeks of my MOOC flew past like Wally West with diarrhea. I was pretty sad to be finishing the course, having realised that I’d actually learned a fair amount about Richard III and society in 15th century Britain.  SPOILERS! Did you know, for example, that until relatively recently, ‘fish’ was used as a term to describe any aquatic-based animal, so as well as sturgeon, pollock, bream and the like, ducks, beavers and terrapins were also categorised as fish (and therefore, allowed to be eaten on a Friday)?  Did you know that Richard III had roundworm when he died?  Or that peasants, because they couldn’t afford to eat meat every day, actually had a healthier diet than their zealously carnivorous overlords? So, no credits or official certificate to say I’ve ‘passed’ the course (there was no summative assessment, and formative assessment took place at the end of each week’s quiz by way of a 5-8 question multiple choice quiz), but the nice image above gives all the proof I need, and completion of a MOOC will possibly look good on my CV.  Importantly, all the things I talked about in parts 1 and 2 of this subject combined, by course’s end, to make me feel quite downhearted when I clicked the final ‘activity complete’ button - very much like when one reads a book and simultaneously wants to get to the end and devour every glorious word, but also wants to savour it, eke it out and not let it come to an end. Interestingly, completing this course has whetted my appetite to sign up for another.  I’m not sure how wise this is: the time is fast approaching to make a start on my dissertation and I need to make a few tweaks to my CMALT ePortfolio.  Plus, despite my feelings of sadness at reaching the end of the MOOC, I also feel as if a small weight had been lifted - I now have more time to concentrate on the aforementioned ‘other stuff’. Finally, I’ve been invited to submit a brief abstract for  JISC’s eLearning in HE Conference in Manchester in March, so have written the following and sent it off, hoping that it fits into the conference’s themes of developing knowledge through hands-on practice and the learner as a collaborator: MOOCS (Massively Open Online Courses) have been a prominent part of the ILT zeitgeist for a few years now, and have attracted strongly opposing comments, with creators, users and commentators standing on two very different sides and stating that MOOCs are either the ‘next big thing’ in education, or a waste of time and money.  I have recently been able to experience first-hand how an engaging and successful MOOC can work incredibly well - and key to this is the community of practice formed and managed by the students themselves.  I would argue that without this self-created online presence MOOCs are likely to fail, and that providing an assessment of my own experiences will also provide food for thought to anyone who is thinking of creating, delivering or studying a MOOC. Fingers crossed…

"Moved in" today. Snapped a few pics of the almost-empty space. Click here, check the last part of the stream. WINDOWS! OH, THE WINDOWS! I’ve got 80 days and 80 nights until students arrive on September 6th. Twice as much time as the biblical Noah. Should be PLENTY of time. -kj-  

I’ve looked at this particular topic before this school year as I’ve considered how to best help a couple of students I have in my classes this year.  My ESL student has transferred to another school in the district where he can be better serviced as he learns English and my hearing impaired student is making friends […]

Registration is now open for the 26th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning - August 4 - 6, 2010 in Madison, WIsconsin, home of the University of Wisconsin, my alma mater. This year’s conference provides over 20 workshops and...

My job means I get to play around all day with a nice mix of technology and education.  It means that I need to know about lots of emerging and developing technologies, theories, ways of teaching and learning, hardware, software…and so on, and it also means that I need to be (seen as) positive and optimistic about all things digital, which I always try to be.  And yet, when I stumbled across this post on the JISC RSC Wales blog yesterday, it made me feel as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders: Click image to access post For a number of years now, teaching and learning with mobile devices-now referred to as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD-Because Education Needs Acronyms) has been a constant theme.  It has also been something I have willfully ignored, because BYOD has always felt to me like a massive and incredibly knotty topic as well as a way of working that sounds both time consuming and tricky to manage.  Past experience has taught me that the IT infrastructure (well, the internet) in most institutions isn’t quite ‘fat’ enough or fast enough to deal with the volume of data pinging back and forth. Teachers have to find a way to get students with a massive range of skills levels to do the same thing on a variety of devices working on a variety of operating systems.  And this opens up a veritable shed full of possible problems. What if, for example, using an all singing and dancing app sounds fine in theory…but it isn’t available on all operating systems (Microsoft, I’m looking at you)? What if the WiFi signal is weak or keeps dropping out? What if your students are having trouble connecting their device to the Internet? I did a demo for a browser based quiz (using Kahoot) with a group of PGCE sessions recently, thinking that bypassing branded apps and sticking to the one thing all mobile devices have-the internet-would keep things quick and simple.  What I thought would take no more than 10 minutes took closer to 30 because, despite the wealth of mobile devices present in the classroom, half the class just couldn’t get their devices to connect to the WiFi. We got there in the end, but were I being observed I would have received a right talking to at the end of the session. It’s the easiest thing in the world to assume that everyone can use every aspect of their device, from Internet settings to film editing apps, but usually the truth is quite different.  Owners with the smartest of gadget will likely admit to only using it for phone calls / text messages / Facebook / taking photos. So assuming that all students can use their gadgets to the full is blinkered, naive, and possibly arrogant. Actually, assuming that all teachers have more than a working knowledge of how all mobile devices work is really asking the impossible.  Because surely for an activity to work, this has to be the case doesn’t it? And what if there are more students than devices? It may be good to have a spare iPad available to give to someone without their own tablet…but if they have no tablet, they probably have even less idea how to use the shiny and slightly scary tablet the lecturer has proudly put in front of you than those mentioned above. And do students want to be picked out by their tutor and peers, for whatever reason, as ‘the one who still hasn’t got a smartphone’? Equality of access is more than ensuring that everyone has a device in front of them. Students with physical and special learning needs make deployment of the right devices and software vital…and more complicated.  There can be accessibility issues beyond connection speed too.  ‘Blackboard’ can be accessed through a browser, but is an incredibly frustrating site to use on a device with a screen as large as an iPad, so must be hellish on a BlackBerry.  It can also be accessed via an app, but only on an Apple or Android-powered device, so is no good for people using Microsoft devices. And bingo!  We have an inequality of service issue. So I completely and utterly understand why teachers don’t bother. And I know that I should slap on my positive face and try to convince them that this is how (someone) has decided our students will learn BEST from now on, so get on board because you don’t want to get a reputation as an educational dinosaur. And if the shed full of problems wasn’t there, I would. I don’t want to be seen as a Luddite, and there are some common sense approaches to BYOD mentioned in the following articles, so I’ll finish up by linking to these, thereby leaving on a more positive note. UFI Charitable Trust: Primer on Bring Your Own Device - 7 reasons to leave them to their own devices (advocates letting students use their own devices in ways that suit them as a means of learning rather than trying to deliver lessons with prescriptive ‘you need a mobile device, this app and a working knowledge of network troubleshooting t0o do this’ content. Donald Clark: Keep on taking the tablets - 7 reasons why this is lousy advice (there must be something magical about the number 7!  Quite liking the author’s conclusion:  "I’m not against the use of tablets in schools, I just think that turning it into a ‘movement’ is a mistake and that too many of these projects are poorly planned, badly procured and lack proper evaluation.")

Today’s the first full day working on the #K4STEMLAB. Key goals: Project Plan version 0.1 (should have done this weeks ago) Room Measurements & Floor Plan Develop Matrix of EiE Unit Maps by Grade Level, determine what to order Inventory donated materials More later, gotta run!